Adrian Kavanagh, first posted 5th January 2026 – updated 14th January
This post will list all the officially selected/declared candidates for the upcoming Galway West and Dublin Central by-elections, which will take place at some stage in Spring/early Summer 2026.
Continue readingAdrian Kavanagh, 15th October 2025
Here are the ten constituencies that were the most successful constituencies (as ranked by vote share) for female candidates at the 2024 General Election. Women won more votes than men in just five of the forty three constituencies being contested at this election. Nationally, female candidates won 31.7% of the overall first preference votes cast at this election. It’s obviously far from a 50-50 split in terms of a gender voting breakdown, but it is a vast improvement on how things stood at the 2011 General Election, where women accounted for only 15.2% of the candidates. The level of change over the past decade and a half has been driven by the introduction of a gender quota, in the wake of that 2011 election contest, with political parties standing to lose half of their state funding if they fail to achieve the gender quota target (and political parties in the Republic of Ireland are very much reliant on this state funding(. The quota was initially set at 30% (as used at the 2016 and 2020 elections), but the legislation made provisions for this to increase to 40% within seven years of the first general election at which the quota was used (i.e., from 2023 onwards) and the 40% gender quota target was in place for the first time at the 2024 General Election.
Continue readingAdrian Kavanagh, 26th November 2024
What are the most “competitive” constituencies at General Election 2024? There are different ways of thinking about this, but most of these are largely opinion-based and not quantifiable. In this article, I have tried to devise a more “objective” way of determining the relative competitiveness levels of different constituencies and ultimately a constituency’s overall ranking is simply based on how “the numbers fall” and not my own opinion.
Continue readingAdrian Kavanagh, Originally posted on 2nd September 2024
In a similar vein to earlier posts relating to the 2020 General Election, 2016 General Election and 2011 General Election candidates, this page seeks to list the names, and party affiliations, of all the candidates for the 2024/2025 General Election whose ages fall in the 21-35 years age category. (Candidates whose ages fall in the 18-30 years age category will be denoted by a * – all the other candidates listed here fall into the 31-35 year age category, apart from those cases where it is not clear whether the candidates falls into the 21-30 or 31-35 age categories.)
Continue readingAdrian Kavanagh,17th July 2024 – latest update: 22nd October 2024
Following on similar posts that were completed ahead of the 2011 General Election, the 2016 General Election and the 2020 General Election, this post will list all of the Dail deputies who have retired/stepped down during the lifetime of the current Dail or who have announced that they will not be contesting the next general election. This list will not include any outgoing Dail deputies, who did contest their party’s selection convention but failed to win a nomination.
Continue readingAdrian Kavanagh, First Posted – 10th July 2024, Most Recent Update – Tuesday 26th November 2024
We are now in the run in to the next general election, which in theory could have taken place at any stage up to March 2025, but now looks likely to take place in November 2024 or early December 2024. This post will track all candidate selections or candidate declarations, with respect to the next general election, as and when these happen (and, more importantly, as soon as I become aware of them!). The rule of thumb here is that I will add party candidates in most cases only after they have been officially selected to run for the party at a selection convention or by some other means of candidate selection. In the case of non-party candidates, I will add these to the list as soon as a non-party candidate has declared their intention to contest the upcoming general election (and I become aware of this).
I try my best to find information about candidate selection conventions at the local level, but in some cases this information is hard to find and occasionally it can be some time after a convention takes place before I find this information and hence am in a position to update this page accordingly. In some cases, a candidate may have withdrawn some time before I am aware of this and hence remain on this page after they should have been excluded. This post also takes account of the fact that there will be changes to Dáil constituencies at the upcoming general election.
Continue readingAdrian Kavanagh, 4th June 2024
This post will attempt to list all of the “New Irish”, or Non-Irish/UK national, candidates who have been officially selected to contest the local elections on 7 June (2024), or else have declared their intentions to contest these elections as independent candidates. For the purposes of this post, the definition of “New Irish” includes people who were born outside Ireland and who were not Irish (or UK) citizens before moving to the Republic Ireland. This post will include candidates who subsequently gained Irish citizenship on moving to, or after moving to, the Republic of Ireland, as is the case for a number of the candidates listed here.
Continue readingAdrian Kavanagh, 12th May 2024
To make it easier for readers to access all the pages relating to candidate selections for the (upcoming) 2024 City and County Council elections quickly, I will list all the relevant pages in this posts. As of now, nominations have not been finalised, so up to the close of nominations on 18 May (or some days after that) the details on the pages, as listed here, may still be changed.
NB: If you do use this website/any of these pages to gain information for your work (e.g. media reports/newspaper articles, academic research… etc.) please do make sure to cite/reference this site, as the information gathered on these page has taken a lot of time to do (over thirteen months work) on my part.
Continue readingAdrian Kavanagh, 3rd April 2024
In a similar vein to earlier posts relating to the younger 2011 General Election candidates, 2014 Local Election candidates, 2016 General Election candidates, 2019 Local Election candidates and 2020 General Election candidates, this page seeks to list the names, and party affiliations, of all the 2024 County Council and City Council election candidates whose ages will still fall in the 18-35 years age category at the time that the 2024 elections take place (7th June 2024).
Continue reading
Irish Elections: Geography, Facts and Analyses 